Women's Capabilities and the Right to Education in Bangladesh

The World Bank promotes women's education because it is an input into human capital. In the capabilities approach, education is a force that enables women to have expanded choices. Using data from in-depth interviews conducted in two villages in 1996 and 2000, we examine how rural Bangladeshis perceive women's education and to what extent those perceptions concur with the World Bank's instrumentalist view and with the capabilities approach. Parents educate their daughters because women's education is valued in the marriage market, and marriage is the best way to secure their daughters' well-being. Schooling has also enhanced women's capabilities by increasing their earning potential.     

The spaces of economic crisis: Asia and the reconfiguration of neo-Marxist crisis theory

Neo-Weberian and Marxist theories of crisis have typically been built around analysis of crisis tendencies in a single industrially developed national economy. While neo-Marxist theories of development have noted various implications of analyses that take seriously the specificities of capitalism in developing countries, there is somewhat less work from neo-Marxist perspectives on theories of crisis. The economic crisis that hit Asia in 1997 has important transnational and subnational dimensions that invite further elaboration of such a neo-Marxist perspective. This article engages such elaboration through critical reconfiguration of Samir Amin’s core-periphery spatial ontology and deployment of this reconfigured ontology to explain specific features of the uneven development of the Asian crisis. Jim Glassman is assistant professor in the Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia. His interests are in state theory and the political economy of development in newly industrializing countries of Southeast Asia. He has conducted previous research on industrial development in Thailand, as well as on the economic crisis and structural adjustment in Thailand, South Korea, and Indonesia. His current research focuses on populist and nationalist political reactions to the Asian economic crisis. An earlier version of this article was presented at the Global Economic Geography Conference in Singapore, December 1999. The author would like to thank participants in that conference, along with Ruth Berins Collier, Eric Sheppard, and two anonymous SCID reviewers for valuable comments and criticisms. Some of the research for the article was undertaken with the assistance of an Izaak Walton Killam Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia.     

Economic orthodoxy and the East Asian crisis

It is increasingly apparent that the Asian economic crisis has also led to a serious ideological crisis in the West. Before the collapse there was broad agreement among Western orthodox economists that developing countries should pursue a set of economic policies, often referred to as the 'Washington consensus', which included financial sector liberalisation, privatisation of state-owned enterprises, fiscal discipline and trade, exchange rate and foreign investment deregulation. Since the collapse, however, this consensus has broken down. This paper examines the emergence of the new so-called post-Washington consensus, with its emphasis on governance and social capital. The lexicon of the new policy paradigm underlying this new consensus includes civil society, safety nets, and, especially, governance, to be added to the conventional Washington terminology of open markets, deregulation, liberalisation and structural adjustment. Our central thesis is that this new post-Washington consensus is an attempt to place more emphasis on the political and institutional foundations for programmes of structural reform. However, it is also a kind of politics of antipolitics that attempts to insulate economic institutions from the process of political bargaining.     

State,society and the African crisis

Rehabilitation after violent conflict is today relevant to many countries - especially but not only in SSA - and hopefully will become so for more. It is in generally too narrowly specified, too short term and too fragmented with no macro strategic or conceptual frame. Further it is usually based on quite inadequate knowledge of the history, priorities and dynamics of the afflicted country. Rehabilitation has-or should have-interacting economic (especially livelihood rebuilding), social (stress and perceived inequity reducing) and political (reconciliation and legitimacy restoration not least by rehabilitating basic service access including user friendly, personal security oriented civil police and magistrates courts system). In severely war impacted countries these are likely to be among the most economically efficient ways to regaining growth and restructured economic development as well as of rebuilding social and political reconcilliation and religitimisation.     

Paradigms of doom and the development management crisis in Kenya

Public Enterprise in Kenya: What Works, What Doesn't and Why. By Barbara Grosh. Boulder, CO and London: Lynne Reinner Publishers, 1991. Pp.223. $45. ISBN 1 55587 209 3

The Culture of Politics in Modern Kenya. By Angelique Haugerud. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Pp.265. $59.95 ISBN 0 521 47059 5

Kenyan Capitalists, the State and Development. By David Himbara. Boulder, CO and London: Lynne Reinner Publishers, 1994. Pp.191. $40. ISBN 1 55587 430 4

African Successes: Four Public Managers of Kenyan Rural Development. By David K. Leonard. Berkeley, CA and London: University of California Press, 1991. Pp.364. $19.95. ISBN 0 520 07075 5     

Modernist discourse and the crisis of development theory

The field of Third World studies is thought once again to be in a state of crisis, thanks largely to disillusionment with the once-dominant dependency “paradigm.” Amidst renewed interest in developmentalism and the clamor for an alternative to dependency, this article argues, first, that the major achievements of dependency theory remain largely unrecognized because the approach has been so frequently misrepresented or misunderstood. Whatever the ultimate status of dependency’s theoretical claims, it contains elements of a countermodernist attitude which ought to be retained in any new approach to the study of Third World development. Second, the article argues that, despite these accomplishments, dependency remains trapped, along with developmentalism, within a modernist discourse which relies on the principles of nineteenth century liberal philosophy; that it treats the individual nation-state in the Third World as the sovereign subject of development; and that it accepts the Western model of national autonomy with growth as the appropriate one to emulate. The final section of the article discusses the efforts of a number of scholars to ground knowledge in local histories and experiences rather than building theory through the use of general conceptual categories and Western assumptions. Although these ideas currently remain on the margins of Third World studies, it is to be hoped that dependency’s loss of intellectual hegemony has at least opened up a space for them to be taken seriously, in the same way that dependency was itself taken seriously in the late 1960s. Kate Manzo is assistant professor of political science at Williams College in Williamstown, MA 01267. Her research and writing interests focus on theories of development and on the nature of South African change. She is currently at work on a book entitledAfrikanerdom and Race: The Nature of Ideology in a Changing Society.     

The agricultural crisis in Egypt

The paper probes the historical origins of and current responses to the agricultural problems of Egypt. Much of the difficulty stems from the fact that the class structure, the distribution of resources, and the social bases of both Nasser's and Sadat's regime have blocked either the mobilization of the peasantry on the one hand or the provision of decentralized incentives on the other. After a brief assessment of Nasser's land reforms, price policies, and investment strategy, the current responses of changing crop patterns and mechanization are assessed. Such a strategy seems unlikely to succeed, but no other obvious alternative strategy is at hand.     

Attaining participatory objectives: Citizen information and training needs

In this article the authors examine three interrelated elements of citizen participation: participatory objectives, participation techniques, and citizen information and training needs. Four objectives of citizen participation are identified, and techniques are then categorized according to their most appropriate objective. Each objective and its associate techniques are examined in terms of participant training and information needs. The intent is to illustrate the relationship between participatory objectives and techniques and that training and information relevant to the techniques selected is necessary.     

Righting the Resource Curse: Institutional Politics and State Capabilities in Edo State,Nigeria

Abstract

The poor record of liberal reforms sponsored by the international community in postcolonial settings underscores the real politik of institutional change. What we call a ‘new normal’ in development policy and practice foregrounds the role of agency – leadership, networks of connectors and convenors, entrepreneurs and activists – but it has less to say about the political and economic conditions of possibility in which agents operate. The putative powers of agency seem most challenged in contexts of extreme resource dependency and the resource curse. The particular case of Edo, a state in the oil rich Niger delta region of Nigeria, illustrates the intersection of agency and structural conditions to show how ‘asymmetric capabilities’ can emerge to create, constrain and make possible particular reform options.     

A comparative analysis of the impact of the 1997 Asian crisis and the contemporary global economic crisis on the Korean political economy

The 1997 Asian crisis created a political space for neo-liberal reformers within the Korean state to advance a set of policies that had previously been frustrated. This agenda is widely seen to have stalled following an initial burst of neo-liberal reform in the post-crisis period. Several scholars have argued that a partial reconstruction of an economy dominated by a closed nexus between the state and leading domestic firms is taking place in contemporary Korea. Compared to the 1997 crisis the macroeconomic impact of the contemporary crisis on Korea has been limited. However, Korea initiated the largest fiscal stimulus (in relation to GDP) in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. In terms of the policy environment the impact of the contemporary crisis has been considerable. This paper argues that key aspects of the Korean state's response to the crisis represent a selective limited retreat from neo-liberalism, the significance of which should not be overstated.